Why Religious Believers Don't Take Intellectuals Seriously

Why This Page?

Several times in my life, I have been in the position of knowing people on
the opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, and I keep seeing similar
patterns on both sides. First of all, both sides picture themselves as powerless
in the face of an oncoming avalanche. You can't stand two people back to back
and have both of them twelve feet taller than the other. Obviously one side or
the other, and usually both, have serious delusions about how powerful and
malevolent their opponents are. Generally both sides are grossly misinformed
about what the other side believes, and when I have tried to communicate between
sides, I find an identical response. I get arguments so specious that it's
obvious the clear intent is to frustrate understanding. It's not that one side cannot
understand the other - they will not understand.

So, in the spirit of Rhett Butler, who joined the Confederate Army after
the fall of Atlanta, saying he could only get attached to a cause after it was
really good and lost, this page and its companion are an attempt to tell intellectuals
and religious believers what each side thinks of the other.

If you're an intellectual who is embarrassed by the specious reasoning that
is rampant in academia, or a conservative Christian who is appalled by the awful
reasoning spouted from many pulpits, I am not writing about you. So
you're wasting our time by writing and saying that you don't
commit any of these sins. But if you blissfully assume that your side is good
and the other side is evil, and you're shocked and offended by what I say about
you, good.

Stop

Dollars to doughnuts you are reading the wrong page.
If you style yourself a religious believer and are looking for more reasons not
to take intellectuals seriously, you are on the wrong page. Go read Why
Intellectuals Don't Take Religious Believers Seriously first. Then, when you
have cleaned up your own act and don't practice any of the fallacies described
there, you can read this page. This page is meant for intellectuals who wonder
why their dealings with religious believers are so unsuccessful.

Also, please don't waste your time and mine trying to rebut the points
presented here. If you choose not to understand why you can't communicate
effectively with your opposition, and why you're not being taken seriously,
that's your choice and the other side's gain. You're only demonstrating that you
missed the point. You are free to visit all the Web sites you like that cater to
your preconceptions.

The Bottom Line

Blatant Stereotyping

Ignorance of Even Basic Facts

Intellectual Dishonesty and Specious Reasoning

If you read this page and its companion, you will note they follow almost
identical structures. This is because intellectual dishonesty is pretty much the
same regardless of who commits it. On both sides of the divide between religious
believers and intellectuals, we find intelligent people who, instead of using
their intelligence to seek the truth, and allow the evidence to lead where it
will, have already decided what the truth is and use their intelligence to
rationalize preconceived ideologies.

Stereotyping

Myth: Religious believers are dour, unhappy and sexually inhibited.

Reality: The ones I meet don't seem any more or less unhappy and
sexually hung up than the population at large.

Myth: Religion is just a means of avoiding the reality of
death.

Reality: How come Judaism lacked any real concept of an afterlife
for millennia? And how come religious martyrs faced death willingly?

Myth: Religion is rigid and doesn't recognize that right and
wrong depend on context, the way modern thinkers do.

Reality: Actually, it's the other way around. Religion
distinguishes between murder, war, and capital punishment. It's the modern
thinker who says "all taking of human life is wrong." Religion
distinguishes between marital sex and adultery. It's the modern thinker who
says "all sex is right."

Myth: Religion is wish fulfillment

Reality: Who exactly wished for restrictions on personal conduct?
And can't the absence of any final accountability serve every bit as much as
a wish fulfillment?

Myth: Religion serves the interests of the power elite

Reality: How come Christianity, Islam, and Mormonism arose and grew
in the face of persecution? Nazism, which really did propose a
religion based on the worship of power, dismissed Christianity as a vehicle by which the
weak hobbled the strong.

Myth: Religious believers once taught the earth is flat and the
universe was tiny.

Reality: Ptolemy's Almagest, the definitive model before
Copernicus, states explicitly that compared to the sphere of the fixed
stars, the earth is merely a point. When Ptolemy's Geographia
resurfaced around 1400, its description of a spherical earth and map
projections aroused not a flicker of opposition. The myth of the flat earth
seems to be largely the result of a 19th century slander campaign (in part a
reaction to anti-intellectualism among Christians, but that's a topic for
the other page).

Myth: Religious believers lack a social conscience.

Reality: Who runs the food pantry in your home town, a church or
the ACLU? If someone in your town needs help in a hurry, are they most
likely to get it from a social agency or the Salvation Army?

I got an angry response from one reader who offered detailed critiques of
each of the above points. That's a total waste of time, since I already believe
all stereotypes have a basis in truth. Every one of
the above stereotypes has some historical truth. There are also people who cheat
social programs, but that doesn't make the stereotype of welfare recipients as
cheats legitimate.

Ignorance of Even Basic Facts

It's astonishing how often people who would never dream of uttering an
uninformed remark on art or politics seem to feel they can talk knowledgeably
about religion without bothering to acquire even a smattering of knowledge
first. Nowhere is this tendency more obvious than in Hollywood, where films like
Contact or Solaris
will
routinely feature dialogue about religion that is so blatantly uninformed that
it's obvious the writers don't have a clue what any serious theologian ever said
about anything.

Back in the Bad Old Days of Politically Incorrect Westerns (and long before
Dances With Wolves) it was common in Hollywood for Westerns to employ "hugga-mugga
talk." This was random gibberish passed off as Indian dialogue (Hollywood had
not yet discovered that Indians were physically capable of acting.) Most
theology in the movies and on TV is theological hugga-mugga talk, apparently
created by the Great Big Random Theological Buzzword Generator. Viewers got a
double dose in the 2005 TV mini-series Revelations, where both the
theology and the science consisted entirely of random buzzwords.

One example is the oft-repeated canard that religious believers rely on the fear of hell as the
underpinning of morality. Or as the blog site Progressive U put it (October 26, 2006): "Ah, the old
without fear of hell, there would be nothing to stop people from being
bloodthirsty monsters argument. It may come as a surprise to most
Christians, but there are reasons for being good other than fear of
punishment.." It's no surprise to Christians (or other believers) at all,
and betrays a complete failure to understand the argument. It's like claiming
that doctors use the fear of heart attacks to try to get people to live
healthier lifestyles. They do, but doctors didn't make up heart attacks as a
bogey man. Most religions describe God as the author or creator of moral
principles, that is, as the ultimate explanation for why the principles exist at
all. They view their dogmas as describing the actual and natural consequences of disobeying
moral law, not as threats. The moral criticism of disbelief stems mostly from the logical problems inherent in claiming to
have meaningful standards that are not grounded in some extrinsic basis
independent of feelings, cultural conditioning, social consensus, and so on.
If Adolf Hitler were to say "screw you and your social consensus, and I have
the storm troopers to impose my standards," what can the
values-as-social-construct philosopher answer? "You're a bad, bad man, and I
don't like you?" (Notwithstanding my criticism on this point, the
Progressive U piece "16
Common Myths About Atheists" is a good complement to my companion page
Why
Intellectuals Don't Take Religious Believers Seriously)

Consider the following often-posed questions:

How can a good God allow evil to happen in the world?

How can religious believers reconcile war or capital punishment with the
commandment "thou shalt not kill?"

Why can't evolution simply be God's way of creating new life forms?

If you have ever asked any of these questions, or if you can't summarize the
major schools of thought on these questions, you are theologically
illiterate. You have no business in any debate involving religion because
you simply know nothing at all about the subject.

How can a good God allow evil to happen in the world?

Volumes have been written on this subject but almost nobody who tosses off
this question asks it seriously, because nobody who asks this question has done
all that he or she personally can do to prevent evil. If you're concerned about
oppression, go to some oppressed country and help people fight, like the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade did during the Spanish Civil War. If you're concerned about
justice then go into law or politics and do something about it. If you're
concerned about sickness then go into medicine. I know a retired doctor who
spent his life dealing with cancer in children. He's entitled to ask why
God would let a child get cancer; idle bystanders aren't. If you're concerned
about homelessness then raise capital and build low-cost homes, or at the very
least join Habitat for Humanity.

Most people who ask this question glibly really want to know why a good God
would invade their comfort zone; why a good and loving God would force them to think
about unpleasant realities.

How can religious believers reconcile war or capital punishment with the
commandment "thou shalt not kill?"

Ever wonder why it's "Thou shalt not kill" but "David slew
Goliath?" Because once upon a time before we got intellectually sloppy, we
had two words for taking human life. Although there's some overlap in usage,
generally the Bible uses "slay" for things like killing in battle, and
"kill" for murder. To this day we preserve the use of "slay"
in terms like "manslaughter."

Anyway, people who wouldn't dream of using "neither a borrower nor a lender
be" as an indication of Shakespeare's own opinions, seem incapable of realizing
that the real meaning of "thou shalt not kill" has to be sought in the totality
of Biblical teachings on the taking of human life, including the numerous
passages that command capital punishment for certain offenses.
Fundamentalists aren't the only people who wrench Biblical quotations out of
context.

Why can't evolution simply be God's way of creating new life forms?

Most religious believers don't have a problem with this, but asking it in
connection with debates on evolution reveals an utter ignorance of what
creationists think. To them, the issue is preserving a literal interpretation of
Genesis. Anything not consistent with supernatural creation a few
thousand years ago is "evolution." In creationist parlance, the idea
that God used evolution to create life is called "theistic evolution." Asking this question is on an exact
par with attempting to publish a research paper without looking up a single
reference.

Intellectual Dishonesty and Specious Reasoning

"Blaming the Victim"

Perhaps no single concept illustrates the pervasive speciousness of some
intellectuals than the phrase "blaming the victim." You can't hope to find a
more explicit platform for intellectual dishonesty than this quote from Jack
Levin and William Levin's The Functions of Discrimination and Prejudice.

Victim-blaming is the tendency, when examining a social problem, to
attribute that problem to the characteristics of the people who are its
victims. In contrast, a non-victim-blaming perspective would focus on the
social forces that deny opportunity to the victims of a social problem,
while ignoring any apparent differences in them that might be caused by such
treatment.

It's good that I can cite such a reference, because I'd be accused of making
up a straw man otherwise. For openers, there's the word "victim" which clearly
indicates that the individual is the innocent target of hostile outside forces,
as opposed to a neutral label like "person affected by a problem" or "person in
a problem situation." Then there's the label "blaming" which automatically
attributes hostile intent to anyone attempting to question whether individual
values and attitudes might contribute to the problem. It is already
predetermined that the root cause is "social forces that deny opportunity to the
victims of a social problem," that any individual differences are only
"apparent" (we won't ask why some people from the most hostile environments
avoid crime, drug abuse and poverty). Indeed, it's considered intellectually
responsible by these authors to "ignore" potentially relevant data.

"Simplistic"

Hard on the heels of "blaming the victim" as a beacon of specious thinking is
"simplistic." The reasoning is wonderful: an idea that explains the data simply
and economically is wrong for that very reason, and the better the idea
explains the data, the greater the evidence that it's wrong. All ideas of any
value are simplifications; the problem with oversimplifications is not that
they're simple, but that they're wrong. And though social problems are
very complex when activists critique ideas they oppose, the problems crystallize
into marvelous simplicity when activists propose solutions of their own: more
money and regulatory power for themselves.

"Epiphenomena"

Epiphenomenon is a popular buzzword used to describe a
phenomenon that is merely a surface event on top of a more significant
phenomenon. Generally, it's used to assert that whatever the user doesn't want
to deal with isn't significant. Frequently, it's used to deny the significance
of moral issues in society, as in the claim that the root cause of the Civil War
was the growing disparity in economic power between North and South, and that
moral indignation over slavery was merely an "epiphenomenon."

All you need to do to make that claim stick is deny tens of
thousands of statements, letters, articles and books by people who saw the Civil
War from Day One as about slavery. More interestingly, if the Civil War wasn't
about slavery, how can the Confederate flag be a symbol of slavery and racism?
As an interesting sidelight, a local mini-mall flies a collection of historic
American flags. The Confederate flag has generated some controversy and been
stolen a couple of times. Nobody has said a word about the other
Confederate flag. See, there were two of them, a battle flag and a national
flag, and most of the people who make noise about "the" Confederate flag are too
historically illiterate to know there were two flags, or recognize it when it
flaps in front of their faces.

Just how far some people are willing to go to avoid addressing values as a
root of social issues is illustrated by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic in
Understanding Words that Wound. They note (p. 23) that black college
students are targets of racial slurs several times a month, and if the term is
broadened to include "code words" the frequency might be as often as every day.
One of the "code words" they mention is "inner city culture." So a term
specifically formulated to address value and behavior problems across racial
lines while avoiding
racial implications as much as possible is twisted around by Delgado and
Stefancic to become a synonym for racism. It becomes
very clear that authors like thiswill not tolerate any attempt to explore values and attitudes as a root of
social problems, but will always disparage them as racism.

"False Consciousness" and "Internalized Oppression"

People in democratic societies often end up using their
empowerment to make choices that intellectuals hate. How can we reconcile the
fact that the masses, whom intellectuals profess to support, keep making wrong
choices? I've got it - they've been duped somehow. Those aren't their real
values; they've been brainwashed into a "false consciousness" by society. If
they were completely free to choose, they'd make the "right" choices. But of
course we have to eliminate all the distractions that interfere with the
process: no moral or religious indoctrination, no advertising or superficial
amusements, no status symbols, no politically incorrect humor. "False
consciousness" is a perfect way of professing support for the masses while
simultaneously depriving them of any power to choose; a device for being an
elitist while pretending not to be.

The post-Soviet version of "false consciousness" is
"internalized oppression." If you're a woman who opposes abortion, a
black with middle class values, or a person with a lousy job who nevertheless
believes in hard work, those aren't your real values. You've internalized
the values of the white male power elite and allowed yourself to become their
tool. You don't really know what you believe. When the enlightened elite want
your opinion, they'll tell you what it is.

The Cost of Intellectual Dishonesty?

Almost anyone who has debated with ideologues has encountered behavior like
this:

The more I argued with them, the better I came to know their dialectic.
First they counted on the stupidity of their adversary, and then, when there
was no other way out, they themselves simply played stupid. If all this
didn't help, they pretended not to understand, or, if challenged, they
changed the subject in a hurry, quoted platitudes which, if you accepted
them, they immediately related to entirely different matters, and then, if
again attacked, gave ground and pretended not to know exactly what you were
talking about. Whenever you tried to attack one of these apostles, your hand
closed on a jelly-like slime which divided up and poured through your
fingers, but in the next moment collected again. But if you really struck
one of these fellows so telling a blow that, observed by the audience, he
couldn't help but agree, and if you believed that this had taken you at
least one step forward, your amazement was great the next day. [He] had not
the slightest recollection of the day before, he rattled off his same old
nonsense as though nothing at all had happened, and, if indignantly
challenged, affected amazement; he couldn't remember a thing, except that he
had proved the correctness of his assertions the previous day.

Sometimes I stood there thunderstruck. I didn't know what to be more
amazed at: the agility of their tongues or their virtuosity at lying.

The author was a young, probably somewhat naive idealist who certainly
underestimated the complexity of ideas and just as certainly overestimated his own
intellectual sophistication. Nonetheless, the intellectual dishonesty he
describes, and his outrage, is real. The author was Adolf Hitler, describing his
student days in Vienna (Mein Kampf, Chapter 2).

The Holocaust has been attributed to the historical conditioning of Germany,
the harsh terms of the Versailles peace treaty, the destruction of Germany's
middle class by the hyperinflation of 1923, the failure of the Vatican to speak
out, the failure of the Western Allies to speak out or bomb the gas chambers or
the rail lines leading to the death camps. Alice Miller, in For your own
good: hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence, even
attributes it to child abuse. But the excerpt above raises a provocative
question: to what extent was Hitler shaped by repugnance at the intellectual
dishonesty he saw in the intelligentsia? Might the Holocaust have been avoided
if young Adolf Hitler had encountered intellectual honesty instead of sophistry
among the intellectuals of pre-World War I Vienna?

The Single Greatest Obstacle

Religious believers will never take intellectuals seriously as long as
intellectuals deny the existence of absolutes.

What is truth? How do we know it when we see it? How can we be sure our
interpretation of it is valid? What about rival claims of truth? These are
difficult questions, challenging questions, wonderful questions. They tell us a
great deal about the limitations of our methods of inquiry. The one thing they
cannot do - what I call the Fundamental Fallacy of Philosophy - is tell us
anything at all about the nature of reality or the existence of truth.
Philosophy since the days of the ancient Greeks has focused on the grand
questions and the limitations of what and how we know, and as a result has
remained stagnant. Science focused on what can be known and mushroomed.

Throwing up your hands in despair over the tough questions in epistemology is
a grand version of the argumentum ad ignorantiam. Pseudoscientists use
this argument all the time, usually prefaced by "Science can't explain..." Most
of the time science can explain the "mystery" but the pseudoscientist
doesn't want to believe the explanation. But even when the answer to a question
really is unknown, that proves only that the answer is unknown. It
doesn't justify interpolating some belief of your own preference, or denying
that the question has an answer.

But of course no philosopher totally denies the existence of absolutes,
either in theory, or in practice. Instead they resort to weasel words. Typical
is an article by Bruno Latour called The Science Wars
(Common Knowledge 8.1, 2002, pages 71-79). He asserts "I ...reject an
absolute point of reference." but then goes on to say that post-modernist
philosophers study "how human beings can speak truly about events" and "The
difference between departments of geology or geoscience and the curio cabinets
of the creationists ... is so huge that I don't see the point of adding an even more absolute
distinction between true and false."

So Latour wants to have it both ways. He wants not to be bound by an absolute
framework but he also wants the power to judge ideas as true and to
differentiate between standard geology and creationism. Especially the latter. Latour's article is peppered with enough gratuitous references to the Religious
Right that it's clear he confuses the existence of truth in general with
accepting the agenda of the Religious Right. If the difference between standard
geology and creationism is anything other than the preferences of two rival
groups, there must be some directional standard that puts one closer to truth
than the other.

In practical terms, people who deny that there are any moral absolutes are
nevertheless quick to assert that it's "wrong" for one group to impose its views
on another, generally while attempting to impose their own views on society. If
moral beliefs are merely a result of socialization, wouldn't it be a lot easier
simply to socialize oppressed groups to accept their fate, and socialize
everyone else to go along with prevailing norms?

Pseudo-relativism seems to spring from three roots:

Laziness: sorting out complex issues or researching how thinkers in the
past sorted them out is way too much like work. It's much easier
simply to dismiss any moral claim you don't like by temporarily putting on
the cloak of relativism. You can take it off when you want to impose your
own ideas on others.

Cowardice: if you accept the existence of absolutes, you may eventually
be confronted with the possibility that something you want to do is
forbidden, or something you dislike is permitted, even obligatory. Maybe
extramarital sex is wrong; maybe war or capital punishment are
right. An ad hoc value system frees you from such inconveniences.

Authoritarianism: you can not only deny the validity of any standard you
disagree with, you can make up new standards of your own to impose on
others. You can, for example, pull the idea that animals have rights out of
thin air and use it to push for legislation restricting the rights of others
to hunt, trap, or eat meat. Perhaps the most absurd extrapolation is the
notion that the term "pet" is demeaning and our dogs and cats should be
called "companion animals." As Dennis Miller noted, when he cleans up my
messes, he's a companion animal; until then, he's a pet.

Finally, in any ostensibly intellectual discussion about the existence of God
or moral absolutes, watch how quickly sex pops to the surface. It's astonishing
how many people who have been prominent militant religious skeptics have also
been outspoken advocates of free sex (what's the fun of being a prominent
iconoclast if you
can't have groupies?) Looking at the criticisms that have been raised against
religion, I would estimate that the real motivation for religious disbelief breaks down
about like this: sex, 75%; hatred of authority in general, 10%; economic
injustice, 8%; war and oppression, 6%; serious intellectual concerns, 1%;
serious intellectual concerns based on actual study of what theologians have
said: too small to register.

To say some folks went ballistic over that paragraph is an understatement.
They did so with a vehemence that suggested I had hit a sore spot.
"Stereotypical" sniffed another recent reader, but since all stereotypes have at
least some basis in reality, the issue isn't whether the comment is
stereotypical (any generalization, no matter how valid, can be blown off as a stereotype), but whether
it's valid. Mindless opposition to authority? I submit the "under God" issue: court
challenges to the phrase "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. An utterly
pointless exercise in petty harassment of religious believers, and one
guaranteed to keep the Religious Right mobilized. What else can you say about
people who are so stupid they work directly against their own interests, solely
to lash out at something trivial they dislike?

As for sex, why are restrictions on abortion or homosexuality any more an
invasion of privacy than forcing people to keep records for the convenience of
the government? Why are so many of the people who are militant about
restrictions on abortion equally willing to defend the government's right to
invade all sorts of other equally private matters? Why are sexual interactions
between consenting partners any more private than financial interactions?